Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Sheila Banani, The Life and Times of August Forel, bahai-library.com.
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T h e L if e and T im e s of August For el
Sheila Ba n a ni
In 1848, the famous “year of revolution,” on September 1, August
Henri Forel was born, the eldest of four children to Victor Forel (b.
Switzerland) and Pauline Morin (b. France), in the country house
called “La Gracieuse” belonging to his paternal grandparents near
Morges, on the shore of Lake Geneva [see photo, next page].1
As a young child he was sheltered by his overly protective mother
who isolated him from outdoor play and friendships, leaving him
bashful and timid, bored and lonely. He found fulfillment in his
physical environment, in nature, initially in the lives of snails and later
in wasps and ants. The “social” life of insects fascinated him in their
encounters, both fighting and assisting one another, and intrigued him
to learn what was inside their nests. But his parents and grandmother
forbade him to keep living insects and he was allowed only to collect
dead ones. This was the beginning of what would become Forel’s life-
long passion and result, ultimately, in his famous book The Ants of
Switzerland [1874] and later the donation of part of his extensive ant
collection, one of the largest in the world, to the Geneva Museum in
1922.
Forel’s Protestant mother gave him a religious education which
taught the Bible, both Old and New Testament, was the revealed
Word of God, “even the most incomprehensible passages,” he wrote
in his autobiography. As a result of his loving respect for his mother,
by the age of fourteen his religious doubts and conflicts led him to
regard himself as “a hardened, outcast sinner, who need not hope for
God’s mercy,” though he still hoped that his “conversion” would come
upon him like a Biblical “miracle” (Forel 25). His schooldays were
passed in Morges and later at the College Cantonal in Lausanne. By
the age of 16 [1864] he faced the dreaded “confirmation” discussions
with the local Pastor. He stammered to the Pastor, “I can’t believe.” In
his autobiography he later wrote: “In the quiet meadows round my
home I had often cried in despair to the so-called personal God: ‘If
you really exist, destroy me here and now; then I shall know that you
exist, but otherwise I cannot believe in your existence!’ But all was
silent; I was not destroyed” (Forel 47).
By 1866, while not particularly attracted to the prospect of
entering education for the field of medicine, he did recognize the
connection between medicine and his love of natural science. So, with
his growing unbelief in God, despite his increasing sense of
independence and self-confidence, he felt himself a pessimist. “On
2 Life and Times of August Forel
every side I saw only lies and disappointments in human intercourse. It
seemed to me that life was hardly worth living. My only consolation
was, and remained, natural science” (Forel 51).
This fateful year
[1866] Forel met
Edouard Bugnion, a
fellow entomologist,
who became his future
brother-in-law when he
married Forel’s eldest
sister in 1873. It is
through Bugnion that
Forel first learned about
Charles Darwin [1809-
1882] and his work.
Forel wrote in his
autobiography: “When I
read [Charles Darwin’s]
The Origin of Species
[written 1859] it was as
though scales fell from
my eyes.... I saw that the
study of medicine was
worthy of my highest
endeavour. It must have
been about this time that
the notion of monism
first dawned upon me,
for I placed the
following reflections on
record: ‘If Darwin is
right, if man is a
descendant of animal
species, and if therefore
his brain also is
descended from the brain of the animal, and if, moreover, we think
and feel with the brain, then what we call the soul in man is a
descendant (an evolutionary product) of the animal soul, of the same
fundamental structure as the latter, and, like it, entirely conditioned,
in its simpler or higher development, by the simpler or higher
development of the brain.... Consequently ... psychology cannot in the
last resort be other than a sort of physiology of the brain’” (Forel 53).
In the University of Cambridge Darwin correspondence files
[internet], I found evidence that eight years later Forel sent to Darwin
[written in French on 23 September 1874, from Munich] a copy of
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 3
his newly published book on Swiss ants [Les Fourmis de la Suisse,
Geneva] and notes points and passages that Forel thinks will interest
him. Darwin responded [28 September 1874] with thanks to Forel and
recommends he read Thomas Belt’s The Naturalist in Nicaragua
[1874] by Darwin’s fellow-countryman. In his autobiography Forel
states: “He [Darwin] asked me the question: ‘Do you read English
easily?’ I [Forel] had no knowledge of English, and felt greatly
ashamed of the fact on receiving this book” (Forel 99-100). Forel
then finds someone to help translate Thomas Belt’s book and writes,
“by the time we finished it I could read English pretty fluently, and in
time I even learned to speak it after a fashion. For this Darwin was
responsible, and I have been grateful to him all my life. Darwin also
sent me his own interesting observations of ants, which led to a brief
exchange of letters” (Forel 100).
In Forel’s last year of medical school in Zurich [1870-1871] he
became enormously interested in psychiatry. “I felt that here, where I
perceived the contact of brain and soul, must lie the key to the
monistic-psychological problem which was engrossing me” (Forel 63).
This interest led him to Vienna [1871-1872] where he prepared his
thesis under the guidance of Professor Theodore Hermann Meynert
[1833-1892], finally passed his medical examinations in Lausanne and
was graduated as a doctor (Forel 79-85). He then received his first
medical appointment in Munich as assistant physician under Professor
Bernard Aloys von Gudden, an asylum director and head of a
laboratory, where he was able to work on the anatomy of the brain
and make the “first thin microscopic section of the human brain,”
which had never been done before (Forel 93). Upon completing and
publishing his book on Swiss ants he was awarded in 1875 the Thore
prize by the Paris Academy of Sciences. This greatly surprised him
until he learned that the politics of granting their academic
distinctions favored not giving it to a Frenchman (Forel 96).
Treatment of the patients in the asylum, some of whom were very
violent, challenged Forel who tried various experiments of separating
out the physically infirm for better care and, for the first time [in
1876], he began to understand the insidious role of alcohol as a
problem for the patients. However, it was not until a few years later
that he became convinced that only total abstinence from alcohol was
healthy.
In 1877 Forel became qualified as a lecturer in the University of
Munich and, as a member of an entomological society, met and
became close friends with Edouard Steinheil, the father of the child
Emma [then twelve years old] who, years later [1883], becomes
Forel’s wife (Forel 105). Edouard Steinheil had previously made a trip
to South America [Colombia] and now, with Forel, planned a six-
4 Life and Times of August Forel
month ant hunting expedition there, so Forel took a leave of absence
from his work in 1878 and they set out together. On their voyage
when they reached the Caribbean, at the first stop at the island of St.
Thomas, Steinheil took ill while still on board ship and suddenly died
of tropical heat-stroke. His body was taken ashore for burial on the
island where Forel served as his only mourner (Forel 109-111). Forel
returned immediately then to Munich to break the news to Steinheil’s
family and returned to his own family home in Morges, to his old
room, since he was still on his six-month leave of absence from his
work at the Munich asylum and as a lecturer at the University. During
this period Forel received and accepted an appointment to become
assistant physician at the Burgholzli Institute, an asylum in Zurich. He
served at Burgholzli for the next nineteen years [1879-1898]. Upon
his arrival at the asylum, he found himself having to act also as its
temporary director as well as physician and to look after the women’s
division in an insane asylum with more than 300 patients. Within a
few months he was formally appointed the Burgholzli Institute
Director and given a full professorship in the University of Zurich
(Forel 138).
Now that his career path seemed quite settled, Forel arranged for
the widow of his fellow entomologist friend Edouard Steinheil and
her children [including young Emma, now a teenager] to come from
Munich to visit his parents while he too was on a vacation at home. In
subsequent visits to the Steinheil home, Forel’s affection for Emma
began to grow slowly though his naturally pessimistic outlook led him
to fear that she would reject him as too old [he was 35 at this time].
But on the contrary, he relates in his autobiography, “I was positively
dizzy with joy when at last a young girl, and, indeed, the daughter of
the family I loved so dearly, confessed that she loved me. A totally
new world was opening before me, and I can truly say that at one
stroke the pessimism that had hitherto oppressed me vanished and was
replaced by a firm, optimistic confidence. I could not only love,
deeply and tenderly, but — and this seemed a sort of miracle to me — I
could also be loved” (Forel 145). The wedding took place in the
nineteen-year-old bride’s family home in Munich the end of August
1883 with both families present in a simple ceremony. When Forel
took his bride Emma back to Zurich she quickly made friends with
various inmates of the Burgholzli asylum, organizing a choir and
various festivities for those patients able to participate. Their first
child, Edouard, was born November 15, 1884 followed by five more
children, altogether four girls and two boys, the last child born in
1896 when Forel was 48 years old (Forel 231).
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 5
In these early years at
Burgholzli he met a boot-
maker, Jakob Bosshardt,
who tried to convince him
that alcoholism was not
curable except by total
abstinence which Bosshardt
exemplified by rescuing and
curing by abstinence many
alcoholic former patients of
the Burgholzli Institute.
Forel, although a believer in
the temperance movement,
did not accept total
abstinence until he slowly
began to realize the positive
success rate and cures
accomplished by abstinence.
Forel relates that he asked
Bosshardt, “‘I want you to
explain something: I am a
psychiatrist, employed, as
director of the asylum, to
heal the sick, and you are a
shoemaker; how is it, then,
that I have never yet been 1883 marriage to Emma Steinheil. ‘Everything
about her was tender and thoughtful.’
able to cure a drunkard
permanently, while you are Source: Vader, between pages 4 and 5
so successful?’ To this Bosshardt replied, with an understanding smile:
‘It’s very simple, Herr Direktor: I’m an abstainer, and you are not!’....
On that very day both my wife and I signed a pledge to abstain from
alcohol.... This incident was for me the beginning of a new period of
my life” (Forel 152-160).
Forel’s brain research led to his formulation of what later became
known as the neuron theory. He wrote a paper on the subject, “Some
Considerations and Results relating to the Anatomy of the Brain,” and
sent it to the Archiv fur Psychiatrie in Berlin but it did not appear in
publication until January 1887. However, without Forel’s knowledge,
Professor Wilhelm His [1831-1904] of Leipzig had arrived at similar
results and published them in a periodical which appeared two months
earlier [October 1886] than Forel’s. Both papers were generally
ignored until 1889 when in Barcelona Professor Ramon y Cajal [1852-
1934] completely confirmed their results “mentioning His and
[Forel], though only briefly” (Forel 163) and, in 1906, Santiago Ramon
y Cajal was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his
6 Life and Times of August Forel
work on the structure of the nervous system which was shared with
the Italian anatomist Professor Camillo Golgi.2
Hypnotism also intrigued Forel because of what he saw as “the
relation between brain and psyche, or between the physiology of the
brain and psychology, and the true monism or unity between cerebral
and psychic phenomena.” He read of research by a Professor Bernheim
of Nancy so he traveled there where he received from Bernheim
instruction in “hypnotism or suggestion, which are one and the same
thing” (Forel 166-167). Forel later wrote a very popular book on this
subject, Hypnotismus und Psychotherapie [1889] which reached its
twelfth edition by 1923.
Forel traveled to North Africa [Tunis and Algeria] for a month in
the Spring of 1889 because of his great interest in ants of that region.
While there he observed the results of famine in some areas and
“comparatively savage people — the Arabs, very difficult to civilize,
because of the influence of Islam — governed by a cultured nation,
the French” (Forel 186). Soon after his return to Burgholzli, he noticed
the people of Zurich were taking a greater interest in the “drink
problem” and, in 1890, an Abstinence Society was founded which was
to become “The International Society for Combating Indulgence in
Alcohol.” He also founded the Ellikon sanatorium for the medical
treatment of alcoholism.
He began to see in his activities and interests the inseparable
connection among alcoholism, social problems, psychiatry, penal law,
and science as well as education. “What is the solution? The
renunciation of alcohol in childhood; freedom of belief, and the
teaching to children of the scientific truth, and their social duties.”
Further problems occupied him: the “sexual problem” [prostitution],
the “feminist problem” [he became a supporter of women’s right to
vote, and women’s rights in general], the problem of an international
auxiliary world-language to promote mutual understanding [he
studied Esperanto], and, the problem of what he called “the human
races” [“Which races can be of service in the further evolution of
mankind, and which are useless? And if the lowest races are useless,
how can they be gradually extinguished?”] (Forel 193). Please recall
the full title of Charles Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in
the Struggle for Life, which dealt with evolution and selection, had
persuasive influence on Forel. He worked out the draft of a Swiss
Insanity Law which, in 1894, was accepted by the Psychiatrists’ Union.
He also was commissioned to draft a bill to abolish brothels (Forel 201-
206).
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 7
Following a three-
month expedition to
Colombia, this time in
the company of his
brother-in-law Bugnion,
he returned to
Burgholzli feeling
exhausted in mid-
1896, just in time for
the birth of his sixth
and last child. By 1897
he was nearing a
general breakdown. “I
had already given up
the anatomy of the
brain, I had handed
over the direction of
the Ellikon asylum ...,
and I had reduced my
studies of the ants to a
minimum” (Forel 237).
He was not yet fifty.
“After my retirement I
can concentrate
wholly, if I wish, on Family Group, 1898
those social and Above: left to right, Inez, Edouard, Martha
scientific tasks which I Centre: Mme Forel and A. Forel
regard as most Beneath: Oscar, Cécile, Daisy
essential” (Forel 238). Source: Miall, page 225
By Spring 1898, Forel left the asylum in the hands of his successor and
friend, Dr. Eugene Bleuler. Soon after [1902] Carl Jung worked as a
psychiatrist under Dr. Bleuler at Burgholzli. Jung was to meet
Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1907.
Forel and his family left Burgholzli to begin his retirement near his
childhood home in the little country village of Chigny in the canton
of Vaud, Switzerland. He took up bicycling and archery. His brother-
in-law Professor Bugnion persuaded him to give a few lectures on
psychology at the University of Lausanne, but he soon discontinued
them because too little interest was shown in the subject (Forel 251).
Forel traveled to the United States, where he delivered a lecture at
Clark University on the occasion of their jubilee festival [1899], and
to Russia [1902] as a member of the International Criminological
Union invited by the Russian Minister of Justice Muravieff (Forel 253-
261). Forel observed “Moscow was at that time a curious mixture of
barbarism and culture, with striking contrasts between wealth and
8 Life and Times of August Forel
poverty, education and ignorance, integrity and corruption, feasting
and starvation. And everywhere society was fermenting under the
surface” (Forel 263).
In Forel’s autobiography, he gives his “retrospect” of the 19th
century at its close: “The beginning of the century stood under the
sign of the French Revolution, whose consequences influenced the
whole century; after which the technical and scientific discoveries that
followed one another with headlong speed, and the names of
Napoleon I, Lamarck, Darwin, and Bismarck, gave the century its
peculiar stamp. If I had to make a choice I should call it the century of
Lamarck and Darwin, in which the doctrine of evolution gave birth to
the germ of the discovery of the identity of the human soul with the
brain, and therewith dealt the deathstroke to the dualism of body and
soul. Compared with this, what is the significance of conquerors,
diplomatists, and technical discoveries?” (Forel 256).
In 1903, Forel and his family moved to the village of Yvorne in the
midst of vineyards near the little town of Aigle at the foot of the
mountains and overlooking the Rhone valley which opens westward
on Lake Geneva. Their home, which his wife called “La Fourmiliere”
[The Ants’ Nest], is where he lived productively his final twenty-eight
years. In 1908, on the occasion of their 25th wedding anniversary, the
Forels celebrated by journeying to Algeria, Tunis, Cairo, Carthage,
and Italy (Forel 264-270). Upon their return to Yvorne, Forel set out
again on lecture tours throughout Europe, the Balkans, Greece and
“The Ants’ Nest,” Forel’s last home, in Yvorne/Aigle, Switzerland 1903-1931
Source: Sheila Banani photo.
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 9
Turkey, visiting organizations for the support of abstinence and
helping form Leagues of Youth. Upon his return to Switzerland, he
celebrated the marriage [1910] of his daughter Martha to Dr. Arthur
Brauns. It is from this couple, ten years later, that Forel learns of the
Bahá’í Faith.
The end of July 1910 Forel endured the sudden and tragic death by
embolism of the pulmonary artery of his first son, Edouard, who had
just passed his examination in medicine and was engaged to be
married (Forel 280-281). Disheartened at his loss, he nevertheless
continued on lecture tours throughout Europe speaking on behalf of
the International Order for Ethics and Culture on such subjects as
eugenics, heredity, instinct and intelligence, morality in men and
animals, heredity and progress in married and sexual life, social and
hygienic requirements of the twentieth century. He expressed the
hope to “gradually build up and firmly establish the new agnostic
ethic, the religion of social welfare” (Forel 283).
Forel had also been studying the new ideas of psychoanalysis
advanced by Sigmund Freud [1856-1939] who had written a review
of Forel’s Der Hypnotismus book when it was first published [1889],
but he absolutely rejected Freud’s “exaggerations in respect of
infantile sexuality, dream-interpretation, and the like.” (Forel 284)
Longing to see the tropics in another part of the world [Africa,
Madagascar, the Indian Ocean] and possibly travel back by way of
Japan and Singapore, studying ants wherever he would go, Forel made
preparations to be gone about one year [from August 1912-1913]. He
had even written his Will [which is included in his autobiography by
the publisher in the German and English editions, but not the French
which was the language in which he wrote his Will]. But on May 17,
1912, as he began to dictate something to his secretary, he was
conscious of a tingling and numbness in his right arm and he could
not find the right words to express himself. He thought he might
have had a slight stroke but a doctor friend examined him and said it
was just due to excessive fatigue. However the symptoms continued,
his speech became indistinct and he fumbled for phrases. Within days
he was paralyzed on his right side. Now he was certain that it had been
a stroke and that he would have to give up his journey to the tropics.
He gradually trained his left hand to do many things. In the autumn
of 1912 he began to write his memoirs, using his wife’s journal since
she had kept an almost daily diary, and continued working on these
memoirs until 1916 when he put them aside for awhile. With his son-
in-law Arthur Brauns he went to Zurich in September for the session
of the International Union for Medical Psychology and Psychotherapy
where he was obliged to accept the Presidency in spite of his
compromised health (Forel 290-295).
10 Life and Times of August Forel
He eventually regained sufficient dexterity to be able to prune his
peach trees and do other gardening at home as rumors of war became
more threatening in Europe. In May 1914 he had written an article at
the request of the Hamburg Allgemeiner Beobachter concerning the
idea of a “United States of Europe” saying he was not in favor of
confining the League of Nations to Europe since he believed it should
include the whole world (Forel 299). As war approached, his eldest
daughter Inez married and moved to Canada, his remaining son Oskar
went with his Alpine regiment to the Swiss-Italian frontier, and his
son-in-law Arthur Brauns left in August for Germany where he was
appointed as an army surgeon in an auxiliary hospital. In Yvorne the
men had to join the frontier garrison. Forel and his remaining family
organized a crèche for infants and young children so the mothers
could replace their husbands in work on the land. He also began
writing pacifist articles which appeared in various periodicals, in both
French and German, and some were issued in pamphlet form in 1915
on the subject Les Etats-Unis de la Terre [“The United States of the
World”] (Forel 303). He expressed this view in his memoirs: “The truth
is that in the interest of the German people, whom I love and esteem,
I cannot too strongly condemn German feudalism and the militarism
and megalomania of the Pan-Germans. On the other hand, in France,
and even in my own country [Switzerland], I was often regarded as a
friend of Germany, and, indeed, suspected of secret Pan-Germanism....
In 1914, and again until 1918, I kept my pacifist correspondence in
special drawers in my library.... Far more significant for me were the
considered writings of really eminent minds, conceived in the neutral
sense of an international reconciliation and a lasting inter-State peace.
These I arranged in a drawer of their own in my library. My own ideas
in respect of the whole problem were recorded in [Forel’s pamphlet]
‘The United States of the World’” (Forel 305).
The biologist Professor Ernst Haeckel [1834-1919], in his 70’s by
1906, had formed the German Monist League along with a board
which included Forel. The Monist League argued for “biosocial
reform” and was an expression of Haeckel’s “social Darwinism” views.
Its philosophy claimed that, on scientific grounds, man was merely a
part of nature with no special transcendent qualities. At the same
time, German social Darwinists claimed Germans were members of a
“biologically superior community,” advancing some of the ideas that
were to become part of the core assumptions of national socialism.3 It
is interesting to note that in 1933, when Hitler became chancellor of
Germany, the Monist League was disbanded.
Views on “racial purity” spread worldwide. The eugenics movement
affected even California when, in 1909, it became the third state to
legalize the sterilization of the feeble-minded and insane. Eugenics
sterilization was in the mainstream of science and politics and upheld
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 11
by the U.S. Supreme Court. Eventually, more than 30 states with such
laws sterilized about 60,000 — a third of them in California, which
finally repealed its law in 1979.4
But Forel disagreed with some of Haeckel’s views. He wrote an
“open letter” in 1914 to Haeckel in Jena, the French version of which
was published in the Journal de Geneve, criticizing Haeckel’s essay on
“World War and Natural History” which he had sent to Forel in which
Haeckel had accused foreign countries of misrepresenting the German
Army as a “horde of barbarians and incendiaries.” Forel reminded
Haeckel that he had written in the Monistische Jahrhundert for
November 13, 1914 that it would be “highly desirable for the future
of Germany, and a federated Continental Europe, to besiege London,
to divide Belgium between Germany and Holland, and to give
Germany the Congo Free State, a great part of the British Colonies,
the north-eastern departments of
France, and the Baltic provinces of
Russia. To this you [Haeckel] add
that Poland should be amalgamated
with Austro-Hungary.... and your
colleagues demand that the
Emperor of Germany shall be the
President of the future United
States of Europe, and that the
military security of this federation
of States shall be entrusted to
Germany.... If these assertions have
any reality, then all foreign
countries, and even our little
Switzerland, will be compelled to
defend themselves against your
schemes of hegemony to the last
drop of their blood” (Forel 303-304).
Haeckel did not reply to Forel.
Shortly after Forel became a
Bahá’í [1920], the U.S. Bahá’í
educator Stanwood Cobb and his
wife, Nayam, visited the Forel home Arthur and Martha Brauns-Forel,
in Yvorne which he records in an Forel’s daughter and son-in-law, from
article on Forel published in The whom he first learned of the Bahá’í
Bahá’í Magazine of September 1924: Faith in 1920. Arthur died in 1925 in a
“After a most interesting tour of his canoe accident. Martha became one
of the pillars of the German Bahá’í
library, ... we noted the pictures of community under the Nazi regime,
Goethe, Haeckel, and Darwin, when the Bahá’í Faith was outlawed.
favorites of Forel (though he told me
he found Haeckel much too Source: Vader, between pages 22-23
12 Life and Times of August Forel
dogmatic, contrasting unfavorably with the modesty of Darwin)...”5
When I visited Switzerland and Forel’s home in Yvorne in 1990
and again in 1991, Auguste Forel’s picture was imprinted on the one-
thousand Franc banknote of Switzerland and it had been in circulation
for a few years. His portrait had also been on a Swiss postage stamp
issued in 1971. However, in 1997 a Swiss Citizens Commission on
Human Rights (CCHR Switzerland) claimed credit that it had
“exposed how the face of the 1,000 Swiss Franc bill was adorned by
one of the founders of the ideology that spawned Nazism — Swiss
psychiatrist August Forel” and that eight months later Forel’s face was
removed from the currency.6
Swiss National Bank
1000-franc note,
obverse and reverse
Source: Iraj Ayman
photocopy of
original bank note
During World War I Forel continually supported anti-war efforts
and movements, even attending international peace organizations
formed in The Hague. On May 1, 1916 he wrote an appeal stating, “I
believe only an international Socialist revolution can help us.... The
human race must kill the three dragons that are strangling it:
Capitalism, Militarism, and Alcoholism, or it will perish, the victim of
all three.... But by overcoming these, by the eugenic mating of the
best, the sterilization of the worst, and the help of social education
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 13
and the training of a well-disciplined, industrious Peace Army of all
men and women ... we may gradually begin a steady ascent to social
welfare on the basis of a supra-national peace.... Yet in vain I seek to
light the lantern of Diogenes, and with it enlighten the rulers of
Europe and America; so far I can find no man among them. Perhaps
one will come even yet.” And in July 1916 he resolved to become an
active Socialist (Forel 313-315).
Switzerland suffered during the war years and the Forel family,
with rationing, was unable to adequately feed and warm themselves.
Forel’s memoir recites that his wife even boiled earthworms for a meal
and that the price of coal forced them to give up central heating and
to content themselves with their fireplace during the winter of 1918-
1919 (Forel 317). At this time the Russian Legation in Bern informed
him that he had been appointed a member of the new Academy of the
Russian Soviet, but he had already heard of the “misdeeds of the so-
called dictatorship of the proletariat” so he sent a letter to the Russian
Legation declining the appointment “unless the deeds of violence of
which I spoke ceased immediately.” He never received a reply and later
heard the Russian Legation was expelled by the Swiss government
(Forel 322-323).
Forel’s memoir, Out of My Life and Work, closes in 1920, eleven
years before his death July 27, 1931 and cremation in Lausanne on
July 29, 1931. His son, Oskar, wrote in August 1934 in an Epilogue to
his father’s autobiography, “August Forel left the publication of his
memoirs to Herr Ernst Reinhardt, publisher, of Munich, since he
wished to make sure that his own family would not be involved in
their publication.... [T]he editor, with the permission of August
Forel’s widow, has greatly abridged it....” Forel himself wrote, “I have
made so many friends and enemies that I have felt afraid that my
obituary would be tendentious in one sense or another. For this reason
I preferred to write my own memoirs.... Many readers will take
offence at my opinions, and this I sincerely regret. But to tell the truth
when it must be told, and yet hurt no one’s feelings, is an art which is
beyond my capacities, and I cannot get out of my own skin, nor do I
wish to ...” (Forel Preface).
He wrote his personal “Testament” in the year 1912 which he states
in his memoir will be read by his son [Oskar] “as my own funeral
oration, during the cremation of my body” (Forel 332). [note: Bahá’í
law stipulates burial, not cremation, although Forel may have been
unaware of this law]. When Forel became a Bahá’í he added a Codicil
in August 1921 to his Will which was also read at his funeral before
hundreds of colleagues and admirers and it was included by the editor
in his memoir. It is this important document which states his Bahá’í
belief, “Our children should not be discouraged; they should, on the
14 Life and Times of August Forel
contrary, take advantage of the present world-chaos, by helping in the
difficult building of an ennobled and supranational human fabric on
the basis of a universal League of Peoples. In the year 1920, at
Karlsruhe, I first made acquaintance with the supraconfessional world-
religion of the Bahá’í, founded in the East seventy [sic] years ago by
the Persian Bahá’u’lláh. It is the true religion of the welfare of human
society, it has neither priests nor dogmas, and it binds together all the
human beings who inhabit this little globe. I have become a Bahá’í.
May this religion continue and be crowned with success; this is my
most ardent wish.... I am dying — I have died — in peace, desiring for
my ashes nothing better than the eternal rest, the ‘Nirvana,’ which
awaits them.... My ashes are sleeping the sleep of death. Remember
this, and think of me only with a quiet and cheerful mind, as you
think of my ants, my books, or the old walnut-trees in the garden....
We dead can do no more to alter the past; you living can give the
future a different form. Courage, then, and to work!” (Forel 341-343)
Dr. John Paul Vader wrote a valuable monograph (drawn from his
dissertation) published as For the Good of Mankind: August Forel and
the Bahá’í Faith [1984] which covers specifically those years
following the writing of Forel’s memoir [1920-1931] after he became
a Bahá’í. A summary of Vader’s work would make this essay too long
but, for a more complete view of Forel’s life, Vader’s book is
recommended. As Vader states, “It is theoretically possible for Forel to
have heard about the Bahá’í Faith before the winter of 1920-21....
Forel himself, however, clearly dates his first meeting with these
teachings to the winter months of 1920-21 which he spent at the
home of his daughter and son-in-law, Martha and Arthur Brauns-
Forel.” Dr. Arthur Brauns had opened his psychiatric clinic in Karlsruhe
and, in 1920, both he and his wife joined the Bahá’í Faith.7 Before
continuing with August Forel’s last years of life, when he was a Bahá’í,
let me conclude the story of the Brauns family since it is through them
the Faith is carried on today by the Forel family.
On September 1, 1925, Forel’s 77th birthday, tragically Arthur
Brauns was drowned in a canoe accident on the Rhone river, leaving
Martha a young widow with five children. Martha Brauns-Forel
became the center of the Bahá’í group in Karlsruhe and later served as
an elected member of the Bahá’í National Spiritual Assembly of
Germany. During World War II she suffered greatly, both personally
[her youngest son died on the Eastern Front and her eldest son was
seriously injured] and as part of the German Bahá’í community during
the eight-year suspension of Bahá’í activity in Germany [1937-1945].
She died at the age of 60 in August 1948.8 In May 2000, the
Karlsruhe Bahá’í community celebrated their 80th anniversary which
included an internet website review of their Bahá’í history from its
beginnings with the activities of Dr. Arthur and Martha Brauns-
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 15
Forel.9 The review states: “Marta Brauns experienced significant
difficulties during the Nazi regime. Shortly after the Nazis came to
power, it became apparent that Bahá’ís would be targets of hostilities
due to their global world views as well as their contacts with people
from all over the world. In 1937 Germany, Himmler outlawed the
Bahá’í religion. Marta Brauns-Forel was accused of participating in
the Bahá’í cause and being in contact with Jews and foreigners. She
was treated badly and insulted by the Gestapo. She wrote the
following to one of her sons: ‘My dear, dear child! It has happened
more than once in my life that I thought this must have been the most
difficult thing that could ever happen to me: August 1, 1914 [the
beginning of World War I], September 1, 1925 [Arthur Brauns’
death] ... but once again, fate has brought me days filled with horror
and dismay, causing me to fear for my own sanity.... I have been to
the Secret State-Police four days in a row now, and I thank God that
you have no idea what that really means.... The Gestapo has taken
everything. All letters and addresses ... no books, not a single page, no
prayer book, not a single one of those framed Golden Words.”10
Soon after Arthur and Martha Brauns had become Bahá’ís in
Karlsruhe, Forel sent ‘Abdu’l-Bahá a letter dated 28 December 1920,
in which he explained, “For my part, I am a monist, in the following
sense: I am convinced that the functionings of the brain and of the
human mind (or soul) are simply an inseparable whole. It follows that I
cannot believe that the individual soul survives after the brain has
died.... In metaphysical matters, on the other hand, I declare myself a
complete agnostic, like the philosopher Socrates or the great naturalist
Darwin, which means that ‘God’ for me is nothing but the Essence of
the Universe, presumably absolute, but for man absolutely
unknowable.... Despite all my admiration for your human principles, I
must confess that I do not understand your ‘Divine’ principles. This,
then, is my question: May I, yes or no, belong to the Bahá’í Faith, with
the agnosticism I have mentioned above, without deceiving myself
and others?” (Vader 14-15)
Forel’s fascinating letter, quite fully describing his beliefs,
activities, and Bahá’í literature he had read apparently was received in
Haifa but not responded to by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá until 21 September 1921
[among the last Tablets composed before ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s death 28
November 1921]. His Tablet to August Forel,11 known now to Bahá’ís
as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s proof of God’s existence, was not received by Forel
in Switzerland until March 1922, more than one year after Forel had
written to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and one year after Forel had already decided
to consider himself a Bahá’í.12
Some explanation is helpful to understand why there were delays in
the response to correspondence between Forel and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
16 Life and Times of August Forel
Forel’s letter13 needed to be translated in Haifa to receive ‘Abdu’l-
Bahá’s considered answer and this was during the last few months of
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s busy life. Then, after ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet was
written, it was decided in Haifa to have it translated into English and
French for wider distribution to Bahá’ís worldwide which is explained
in the cover letter written by Shoghi Effendi, dated 27 February 1922
Haifa, Palestine and sent with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet to Forel. In
Shoghi Effendi’s letter he tells Forel that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s sudden
passing, “has plunged us all in profound grief and added heavily to
our preoccupations and responsibilities. Happily, however, the full
answer to your [Forel’s] epistle had been written, and signed by him
[‘Abdu’l-Bahá] many days before his passing ...” (Vader 18-19)
This essay will not include an analysis of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s famous
Tablet to Forel but, for the purpose of this work, it is important to say
what Forel responded to Shoghi Effendi when he wrote back on
Sunday, 19 March 1922: “... Of course I empower you to publish the
long and interesting answer which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá took the trouble to
give me. Out of love for truth I must tell you, however, that I stray
from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s opinion on one point although at heart I am a
follower of the twelve Bahá’í principles ... the soul dies with the brain,
and I cannot believe that it lives on after the individual has died....
The short and simple question which I ask you please to answer
concisely, in place of your late lamented Grandfather, is this: ‘May I,
yes or no, consider myself a Bahá’í, without being a hypocrite after
the confession of faith I have just made? ... I would like to be a Bahá’í
without misunderstanding and without hypocrisy, a ‘leftist’ Bahá’í if
you like, but with the same rights as are enjoyed by the rightists. I
wanted to ask ‘Abdu’l-Bahá himself [Forel seems to have forgotten
that he did ask ‘Abdu’l-Bahá this very same question in his 28
December 1920 letter], but it is too late. This is why I ask you to
answer in his place ...” (Vader 19-21) Vader reports in his book that
there is no evidence in Forel’s papers of a direct response by Shoghi
Effendi to this letter, though Forel said he corresponded often with
Shoghi Effendi, since tragically much of Forel’s correspondence and
possessions were disposed of after his death. Nevertheless, Forel
undoubtedly considered himself a Bahá’í and continued to identify
himself as one in his letters and publications from 1921 until his death
in 1931.
After his declaration of Faith he had contact with several
prominent Bahá’ís including visits from Hippolyte Dreyfus, Stanwood
Cobb and his wife, Consul and Mrs. Schwarz, Mr. and Mrs.
Mountfort Mills and Miss Martha Root (Vader 28-29). Forel founded
the “Bahá’í group” in Lausanne in May 1922.
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 17
He immediately set himself to teaching and defending the Faith,
particularly on behalf of the persecuted Iranian Bahá’ís in the mid-
1920’s, to influence European public opinion. He audaciously wrote
of these persecutions to the French Foreign Minister Edouard Herriot
[10 April 1925]; to the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna [26 April 1925]
and other newspapers; and to the Secretary-General of the League of
Nations Sir Eric Drummond [12 May 1926] from whom he received a
disappointing, but expected, response stating the League of Nations
was powerless to help since Persia had not accepted an international
agreement for the protection of minorities. When all members of the
Local Bahá’í Assembly of Constantinople were on trial on charges of
subversion, Forel wrote to Mustapha Kamal Pasha [Ataturk] in
Ankara on 18 November 1927. In this letter he advised Ataturk, “... if
you were to declare the Bahá’í Faith as an official religion of Turkey,
in addition to Islam, you would make a great step towards progress
and would give an example to all of Europe and even to all the
nations of the world!” The trial of the Bahá’ís did have a favorable
outcome (Vader 53-59).
Among the most well known of his articles written for and
published in Bahá’í sources is “World Vision of a Savant,” first
published in Star of the West in February 1928 and included in The
Bahá’í World, Volume III, 1928-1930. In this article, Forel shares his
“scientific” views on human behavior which reflect the racist
understandings and attitudes of that time: “... one makes a pretext
that there are differences in races; but if one excepts those races,
altogether inferior, with a lighter cerebrum (according to Wedda
about eight hundred or eight hundred and fifty grams instead of one
thousand) it is a fundamental error.... There are several conditions of
utmost importance which Bahá’ís ought to meet if they wish to remain
scientific.... They should refrain from metaphysics, from seeking to
know the Unknowable; and should occupy themselves wholly with the
social good of humanity here on earth.... Our duty as Bahá’ís is not only
to speak and think of God, but to be active for the social good.”14
Vader cogently reviews those areas of Forel’s beliefs which diverge
from Bahá’í belief as understood today. These include Forel’s concept
of God, in which he considered himself agnostic, monist, pantheist
and unable to believe in a “personal” God, and his rejection of the
immortality of the soul after death. Forel also was outspoken in his
political views, defining himself as a “leftist” and with anti-capitalistic
views, which he incorporated in a listing of 12 principles entitled
“Principles of the Bahá’ís” and published in Sonne der Wahrheit, the
German contemporary official Bahá’í magazine. The final area of
divergence from Bahá’í beliefs was in his racist attitudes, no doubt
influenced by anthropological views of his day (Vader 33-38). Forel
also was among many well known individuals who signed the Anti-
18 Life and Times of August Forel
Conscription Manifesto of 1926 which included Albert Einstein,
M.K. Gandhi, Martin Buber, Bertrand Russell, Rabindranath Tagore,
and H.G. Wells. The 1930 petition Against Conscription and the
Military Training of Youth was signed by Forel, along with some of
the others mentioned before, and also Jane Addams, Paul Birukoff
and Valentin Bulgakoff (secretaries of Leo Tolstoy), John Dewey,
Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, and Upton Sinclair among others.15
When Forel passed away, his Bahá’í daughter Martha Brauns-Forel
informed Shoghi Effendi16 to which Shoghi Effendi’s secretary, H.
Rabbani, replied on Shoghi Effendi’s behalf dated 10 September
1931: “... However great the contradictions in Dr. Forel’s testament in
regard to his attitude towards the Cause we cannot fail to recognize
him as a Bahá’í who had but a partial glimpse of the Bahá’í
Revelation. No one can claim that his knowledge of this Revelation is
adequate, especially in the embryonic stage of its development. Dr.
Forel was sincere in his convictions but like every human being his
comprehension was limited and this was not in his power to change...”
(Vader 40)
The year of Forel’s death,
four months later, Shoghi
Effendi penned his magnificent
letter to the Bahá’ís of the world
[“The Goal of a New World
Order,” November 28, 1931] in
which he ponders the decade
since ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing
[1921-1931], the same last
decade of Forel’s life as a Bahá’í.
Shoghi Effendi laid before us a
description of a war-weary world,
the signs of impending chaos, the
impotence of statemanship, the
guiding principles of world
order, and the principle of
oneness, the “pivot” round which
all the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh
revolve. The call for a federation
of mankind, a deep wish of ‘My beloved Emma, my faithful, kind
August Forel, would, Shoghi and devoted comrade, the unfailing of
Effendi wrote, require “the fire sunshine in my life ... bestowed upon
of ordeal.” Both a call, and a me ... the most precious things in life:
warning, which the world ignores love and optimism.’
at its peril. Source: Vader, between pages 60-1
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 19
Appen di x : Significant dat es o f e v e nts an d correspondenc e
of August Forel a n d ‘ Abdu’l- B a há
Birth & Death of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: May 23, 1844 — November 28, 1921
Birth & Death of August Forel: September 1, 1848 — July 27, 1931
December 28, 1920: Forel wrote an inquiry letter to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
asking if he could be considered a Bahá’í after explaining his
“agnostic views.”
September 21, 1921: Two months before His passing, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
wrote His famous Tablet to Forel on the existence of God. The
original Persian text was then published in Cairo in 1922. Forel did
not receive ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s answer (Tablet) sent from Haifa until the
end of February 1922.
February 27, 1922: Date of the cover letter to Forel from the
Guardian Shoghi Effendi written from Haifa, as the “grandson of
‘Abdu’l-Bahá,” explaining the delay in sending ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s answer
(Tablet) to Forel (various translations were being made). Following
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing, Shoghi Effendi had arrived in Haifa on
December 29, 1921 from England. The Guardian then left Haifa on
April 5, 1922 for rest and recuperation in Europe and was gone for 8
months, returning December 15, 1922. He had left his Great Aunt
Bahiyyih Khanum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, and an “assembly” of 9
persons in charge during his absence.
March 19, 1922: Forel acknowledges receipt of Shoghi Effendi’s letter
and the various translations (into English and French) of ‘Abdu’l-
Bahá’s Tablet to Forel, 15 months after Forel’s original inquiry to
‘Abdu’l-Bahá asking whether he [Forel], could consider himself a
Bahá’í “without being a hypocrite.” No specific answer to Forel’s
acknowledgment of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet was sent from Shoghi
Effendi, but he had left Haifa (see above) on April 5, 1922 to be gone
8 months. Very little of the correspondence remains in Forel’s papers
between Shoghi Effendi and Forel because of disposal by Forel’s heirs.
Forel states, in a Codicil added in August 1921 to his original Will
and Testament, which he had written between 1912, following a
stroke, until 1924, that he learned of the Bahá’í Faith in Karlsruhe in
1920. The Codicil was read, at Forel’s instruction, by his son Oscar at
the ceremony on July 29, 1931 following Forel’s cremation. This is the
one reference of his Bahá’í beliefs left in his writings which survives
today:
At Karlsruhe, in 1920, I first came to know of the
supraconfessional world religion of the Bahá’ís, founded in
the East more than 75 years ago [this was written in 1921] by
the Persian Bahá’u’lláh. This is the true religion of human
social good, without dogmas or priests, uniting all men on
this small terrestrial globe of ours. I have become a Bahá’í.
20 Life and Times of August Forel
May this religion live and prosper for the good of mankind;
this is my most ardent wish.
NOTES
August Forel, Out of My Life and Work, translated by Bernard Miall
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1937) 20. Hereafter referred to in text as
(F o re l with page number reference).
Santiago Ramon y Cajal Biography, Official website of The Nobel
Foundation, last modified June 27, 2003.
George J. Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism: The
Promotion of racist doctrines in the name of science,” American
Scientist, January-February 1988, 76, 50-58.
Mike Anton, “Forced Sterilization Once Seen as Path to a Better
World,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2003, A-1, A-18.
Stanwood Cobb, “Man and the Ant,” The Bahá’í Magazine, 15:6
(September 1924): 166-170.
http:/www.cchr.org.
John Paul Vader. For The Good of Mankind: August Forel and the
Bahá’í Faith. Oxford: George Ronald, 1984, 13. Hereafter referred to in
text as (Vader with page number reference).
“In Memoriam: Marta Brauns-Forel 1888-1948,” BW Vol. XI, 1946-1950,
481-483.
http:/www.bahai.de/karlsruhe/80jahre.html: translated from the German
by Houshang Banani, August 2003.
ibid.
First English translation by Dr. Zia Baghdadi published in SW 13:8
(November 1922): 195-202; another English translation was published in
BW XV (1968-1973): 37-43.
Forel had added the Codicil to his Will in August 1921 declaring himself
a Bahá’í.
Forel’s letter was dated 28 December 1920 although mistakenly referred
to in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet as dated 28 July 1920.
August Forel, “The World Vision of a Savant,” BW III (1928-1930): 286-
287.
http://www.peace.ca
Her letter was dated 22 August 1931.
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
T h e L if e and T im e s of August For el
Sheila Ba n a ni
In 1848, the famous “year of revolution,” on September 1, August
Henri Forel was born, the eldest of four children to Victor Forel (b.
Switzerland) and Pauline Morin (b. France), in the country house
called “La Gracieuse” belonging to his paternal grandparents near
Morges, on the shore of Lake Geneva [see photo, next page].1
As a young child he was sheltered by his overly protective mother
who isolated him from outdoor play and friendships, leaving him
bashful and timid, bored and lonely. He found fulfillment in his
physical environment, in nature, initially in the lives of snails and later
in wasps and ants. The “social” life of insects fascinated him in their
encounters, both fighting and assisting one another, and intrigued him
to learn what was inside their nests. But his parents and grandmother
forbade him to keep living insects and he was allowed only to collect
dead ones. This was the beginning of what would become Forel’s life-
long passion and result, ultimately, in his famous book The Ants of
Switzerland [1874] and later the donation of part of his extensive ant
collection, one of the largest in the world, to the Geneva Museum in
1922.
Forel’s Protestant mother gave him a religious education which
taught the Bible, both Old and New Testament, was the revealed
Word of God, “even the most incomprehensible passages,” he wrote
in his autobiography. As a result of his loving respect for his mother,
by the age of fourteen his religious doubts and conflicts led him to
regard himself as “a hardened, outcast sinner, who need not hope for
God’s mercy,” though he still hoped that his “conversion” would come
upon him like a Biblical “miracle” (Forel 25). His schooldays were
passed in Morges and later at the College Cantonal in Lausanne. By
the age of 16 [1864] he faced the dreaded “confirmation” discussions
with the local Pastor. He stammered to the Pastor, “I can’t believe.” In
his autobiography he later wrote: “In the quiet meadows round my
home I had often cried in despair to the so-called personal God: ‘If
you really exist, destroy me here and now; then I shall know that you
exist, but otherwise I cannot believe in your existence!’ But all was
silent; I was not destroyed” (Forel 47).
By 1866, while not particularly attracted to the prospect of
entering education for the field of medicine, he did recognize the
connection between medicine and his love of natural science. So, with
his growing unbelief in God, despite his increasing sense of
independence and self-confidence, he felt himself a pessimist. “On
2 Life and Times of August Forel
every side I saw only lies and disappointments in human intercourse. It
seemed to me that life was hardly worth living. My only consolation
was, and remained, natural science” (Forel 51).
This fateful year
[1866] Forel met
Edouard Bugnion, a
fellow entomologist,
who became his future
brother-in-law when he
married Forel’s eldest
sister in 1873. It is
through Bugnion that
Forel first learned about
Charles Darwin [1809-
1882] and his work.
Forel wrote in his
autobiography: “When I
read [Charles Darwin’s]
The Origin of Species
[written 1859] it was as
though scales fell from
my eyes.... I saw that the
study of medicine was
worthy of my highest
endeavour. It must have
been about this time that
the notion of monism
first dawned upon me,
for I placed the
following reflections on
record: ‘If Darwin is
right, if man is a
descendant of animal
species, and if therefore
his brain also is
descended from the brain of the animal, and if, moreover, we think
and feel with the brain, then what we call the soul in man is a
descendant (an evolutionary product) of the animal soul, of the same
fundamental structure as the latter, and, like it, entirely conditioned,
in its simpler or higher development, by the simpler or higher
development of the brain.... Consequently ... psychology cannot in the
last resort be other than a sort of physiology of the brain’” (Forel 53).
In the University of Cambridge Darwin correspondence files
[internet], I found evidence that eight years later Forel sent to Darwin
[written in French on 23 September 1874, from Munich] a copy of
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 3
his newly published book on Swiss ants [Les Fourmis de la Suisse,
Geneva] and notes points and passages that Forel thinks will interest
him. Darwin responded [28 September 1874] with thanks to Forel and
recommends he read Thomas Belt’s The Naturalist in Nicaragua
[1874] by Darwin’s fellow-countryman. In his autobiography Forel
states: “He [Darwin] asked me the question: ‘Do you read English
easily?’ I [Forel] had no knowledge of English, and felt greatly
ashamed of the fact on receiving this book” (Forel 99-100). Forel
then finds someone to help translate Thomas Belt’s book and writes,
“by the time we finished it I could read English pretty fluently, and in
time I even learned to speak it after a fashion. For this Darwin was
responsible, and I have been grateful to him all my life. Darwin also
sent me his own interesting observations of ants, which led to a brief
exchange of letters” (Forel 100).
In Forel’s last year of medical school in Zurich [1870-1871] he
became enormously interested in psychiatry. “I felt that here, where I
perceived the contact of brain and soul, must lie the key to the
monistic-psychological problem which was engrossing me” (Forel 63).
This interest led him to Vienna [1871-1872] where he prepared his
thesis under the guidance of Professor Theodore Hermann Meynert
[1833-1892], finally passed his medical examinations in Lausanne and
was graduated as a doctor (Forel 79-85). He then received his first
medical appointment in Munich as assistant physician under Professor
Bernard Aloys von Gudden, an asylum director and head of a
laboratory, where he was able to work on the anatomy of the brain
and make the “first thin microscopic section of the human brain,”
which had never been done before (Forel 93). Upon completing and
publishing his book on Swiss ants he was awarded in 1875 the Thore
prize by the Paris Academy of Sciences. This greatly surprised him
until he learned that the politics of granting their academic
distinctions favored not giving it to a Frenchman (Forel 96).
Treatment of the patients in the asylum, some of whom were very
violent, challenged Forel who tried various experiments of separating
out the physically infirm for better care and, for the first time [in
1876], he began to understand the insidious role of alcohol as a
problem for the patients. However, it was not until a few years later
that he became convinced that only total abstinence from alcohol was
healthy.
In 1877 Forel became qualified as a lecturer in the University of
Munich and, as a member of an entomological society, met and
became close friends with Edouard Steinheil, the father of the child
Emma [then twelve years old] who, years later [1883], becomes
Forel’s wife (Forel 105). Edouard Steinheil had previously made a trip
to South America [Colombia] and now, with Forel, planned a six-
4 Life and Times of August Forel
month ant hunting expedition there, so Forel took a leave of absence
from his work in 1878 and they set out together. On their voyage
when they reached the Caribbean, at the first stop at the island of St.
Thomas, Steinheil took ill while still on board ship and suddenly died
of tropical heat-stroke. His body was taken ashore for burial on the
island where Forel served as his only mourner (Forel 109-111). Forel
returned immediately then to Munich to break the news to Steinheil’s
family and returned to his own family home in Morges, to his old
room, since he was still on his six-month leave of absence from his
work at the Munich asylum and as a lecturer at the University. During
this period Forel received and accepted an appointment to become
assistant physician at the Burgholzli Institute, an asylum in Zurich. He
served at Burgholzli for the next nineteen years [1879-1898]. Upon
his arrival at the asylum, he found himself having to act also as its
temporary director as well as physician and to look after the women’s
division in an insane asylum with more than 300 patients. Within a
few months he was formally appointed the Burgholzli Institute
Director and given a full professorship in the University of Zurich
(Forel 138).
Now that his career path seemed quite settled, Forel arranged for
the widow of his fellow entomologist friend Edouard Steinheil and
her children [including young Emma, now a teenager] to come from
Munich to visit his parents while he too was on a vacation at home. In
subsequent visits to the Steinheil home, Forel’s affection for Emma
began to grow slowly though his naturally pessimistic outlook led him
to fear that she would reject him as too old [he was 35 at this time].
But on the contrary, he relates in his autobiography, “I was positively
dizzy with joy when at last a young girl, and, indeed, the daughter of
the family I loved so dearly, confessed that she loved me. A totally
new world was opening before me, and I can truly say that at one
stroke the pessimism that had hitherto oppressed me vanished and was
replaced by a firm, optimistic confidence. I could not only love,
deeply and tenderly, but — and this seemed a sort of miracle to me — I
could also be loved” (Forel 145). The wedding took place in the
nineteen-year-old bride’s family home in Munich the end of August
1883 with both families present in a simple ceremony. When Forel
took his bride Emma back to Zurich she quickly made friends with
various inmates of the Burgholzli asylum, organizing a choir and
various festivities for those patients able to participate. Their first
child, Edouard, was born November 15, 1884 followed by five more
children, altogether four girls and two boys, the last child born in
1896 when Forel was 48 years old (Forel 231).
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 5
In these early years at
Burgholzli he met a boot-
maker, Jakob Bosshardt,
who tried to convince him
that alcoholism was not
curable except by total
abstinence which Bosshardt
exemplified by rescuing and
curing by abstinence many
alcoholic former patients of
the Burgholzli Institute.
Forel, although a believer in
the temperance movement,
did not accept total
abstinence until he slowly
began to realize the positive
success rate and cures
accomplished by abstinence.
Forel relates that he asked
Bosshardt, “‘I want you to
explain something: I am a
psychiatrist, employed, as
director of the asylum, to
heal the sick, and you are a
shoemaker; how is it, then,
that I have never yet been 1883 marriage to Emma Steinheil. ‘Everything
about her was tender and thoughtful.’
able to cure a drunkard
permanently, while you are Source: Vader, between pages 4 and 5
so successful?’ To this Bosshardt replied, with an understanding smile:
‘It’s very simple, Herr Direktor: I’m an abstainer, and you are not!’....
On that very day both my wife and I signed a pledge to abstain from
alcohol.... This incident was for me the beginning of a new period of
my life” (Forel 152-160).
Forel’s brain research led to his formulation of what later became
known as the neuron theory. He wrote a paper on the subject, “Some
Considerations and Results relating to the Anatomy of the Brain,” and
sent it to the Archiv fur Psychiatrie in Berlin but it did not appear in
publication until January 1887. However, without Forel’s knowledge,
Professor Wilhelm His [1831-1904] of Leipzig had arrived at similar
results and published them in a periodical which appeared two months
earlier [October 1886] than Forel’s. Both papers were generally
ignored until 1889 when in Barcelona Professor Ramon y Cajal [1852-
1934] completely confirmed their results “mentioning His and
[Forel], though only briefly” (Forel 163) and, in 1906, Santiago Ramon
y Cajal was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his
6 Life and Times of August Forel
work on the structure of the nervous system which was shared with
the Italian anatomist Professor Camillo Golgi.2
Hypnotism also intrigued Forel because of what he saw as “the
relation between brain and psyche, or between the physiology of the
brain and psychology, and the true monism or unity between cerebral
and psychic phenomena.” He read of research by a Professor Bernheim
of Nancy so he traveled there where he received from Bernheim
instruction in “hypnotism or suggestion, which are one and the same
thing” (Forel 166-167). Forel later wrote a very popular book on this
subject, Hypnotismus und Psychotherapie [1889] which reached its
twelfth edition by 1923.
Forel traveled to North Africa [Tunis and Algeria] for a month in
the Spring of 1889 because of his great interest in ants of that region.
While there he observed the results of famine in some areas and
“comparatively savage people — the Arabs, very difficult to civilize,
because of the influence of Islam — governed by a cultured nation,
the French” (Forel 186). Soon after his return to Burgholzli, he noticed
the people of Zurich were taking a greater interest in the “drink
problem” and, in 1890, an Abstinence Society was founded which was
to become “The International Society for Combating Indulgence in
Alcohol.” He also founded the Ellikon sanatorium for the medical
treatment of alcoholism.
He began to see in his activities and interests the inseparable
connection among alcoholism, social problems, psychiatry, penal law,
and science as well as education. “What is the solution? The
renunciation of alcohol in childhood; freedom of belief, and the
teaching to children of the scientific truth, and their social duties.”
Further problems occupied him: the “sexual problem” [prostitution],
the “feminist problem” [he became a supporter of women’s right to
vote, and women’s rights in general], the problem of an international
auxiliary world-language to promote mutual understanding [he
studied Esperanto], and, the problem of what he called “the human
races” [“Which races can be of service in the further evolution of
mankind, and which are useless? And if the lowest races are useless,
how can they be gradually extinguished?”] (Forel 193). Please recall
the full title of Charles Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in
the Struggle for Life, which dealt with evolution and selection, had
persuasive influence on Forel. He worked out the draft of a Swiss
Insanity Law which, in 1894, was accepted by the Psychiatrists’ Union.
He also was commissioned to draft a bill to abolish brothels (Forel 201-
206).
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 7
Following a three-
month expedition to
Colombia, this time in
the company of his
brother-in-law Bugnion,
he returned to
Burgholzli feeling
exhausted in mid-
1896, just in time for
the birth of his sixth
and last child. By 1897
he was nearing a
general breakdown. “I
had already given up
the anatomy of the
brain, I had handed
over the direction of
the Ellikon asylum ...,
and I had reduced my
studies of the ants to a
minimum” (Forel 237).
He was not yet fifty.
“After my retirement I
can concentrate
wholly, if I wish, on Family Group, 1898
those social and Above: left to right, Inez, Edouard, Martha
scientific tasks which I Centre: Mme Forel and A. Forel
regard as most Beneath: Oscar, Cécile, Daisy
essential” (Forel 238). Source: Miall, page 225
By Spring 1898, Forel left the asylum in the hands of his successor and
friend, Dr. Eugene Bleuler. Soon after [1902] Carl Jung worked as a
psychiatrist under Dr. Bleuler at Burgholzli. Jung was to meet
Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1907.
Forel and his family left Burgholzli to begin his retirement near his
childhood home in the little country village of Chigny in the canton
of Vaud, Switzerland. He took up bicycling and archery. His brother-
in-law Professor Bugnion persuaded him to give a few lectures on
psychology at the University of Lausanne, but he soon discontinued
them because too little interest was shown in the subject (Forel 251).
Forel traveled to the United States, where he delivered a lecture at
Clark University on the occasion of their jubilee festival [1899], and
to Russia [1902] as a member of the International Criminological
Union invited by the Russian Minister of Justice Muravieff (Forel 253-
261). Forel observed “Moscow was at that time a curious mixture of
barbarism and culture, with striking contrasts between wealth and
8 Life and Times of August Forel
poverty, education and ignorance, integrity and corruption, feasting
and starvation. And everywhere society was fermenting under the
surface” (Forel 263).
In Forel’s autobiography, he gives his “retrospect” of the 19th
century at its close: “The beginning of the century stood under the
sign of the French Revolution, whose consequences influenced the
whole century; after which the technical and scientific discoveries that
followed one another with headlong speed, and the names of
Napoleon I, Lamarck, Darwin, and Bismarck, gave the century its
peculiar stamp. If I had to make a choice I should call it the century of
Lamarck and Darwin, in which the doctrine of evolution gave birth to
the germ of the discovery of the identity of the human soul with the
brain, and therewith dealt the deathstroke to the dualism of body and
soul. Compared with this, what is the significance of conquerors,
diplomatists, and technical discoveries?” (Forel 256).
In 1903, Forel and his family moved to the village of Yvorne in the
midst of vineyards near the little town of Aigle at the foot of the
mountains and overlooking the Rhone valley which opens westward
on Lake Geneva. Their home, which his wife called “La Fourmiliere”
[The Ants’ Nest], is where he lived productively his final twenty-eight
years. In 1908, on the occasion of their 25th wedding anniversary, the
Forels celebrated by journeying to Algeria, Tunis, Cairo, Carthage,
and Italy (Forel 264-270). Upon their return to Yvorne, Forel set out
again on lecture tours throughout Europe, the Balkans, Greece and
“The Ants’ Nest,” Forel’s last home, in Yvorne/Aigle, Switzerland 1903-1931
Source: Sheila Banani photo.
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 9
Turkey, visiting organizations for the support of abstinence and
helping form Leagues of Youth. Upon his return to Switzerland, he
celebrated the marriage [1910] of his daughter Martha to Dr. Arthur
Brauns. It is from this couple, ten years later, that Forel learns of the
Bahá’í Faith.
The end of July 1910 Forel endured the sudden and tragic death by
embolism of the pulmonary artery of his first son, Edouard, who had
just passed his examination in medicine and was engaged to be
married (Forel 280-281). Disheartened at his loss, he nevertheless
continued on lecture tours throughout Europe speaking on behalf of
the International Order for Ethics and Culture on such subjects as
eugenics, heredity, instinct and intelligence, morality in men and
animals, heredity and progress in married and sexual life, social and
hygienic requirements of the twentieth century. He expressed the
hope to “gradually build up and firmly establish the new agnostic
ethic, the religion of social welfare” (Forel 283).
Forel had also been studying the new ideas of psychoanalysis
advanced by Sigmund Freud [1856-1939] who had written a review
of Forel’s Der Hypnotismus book when it was first published [1889],
but he absolutely rejected Freud’s “exaggerations in respect of
infantile sexuality, dream-interpretation, and the like.” (Forel 284)
Longing to see the tropics in another part of the world [Africa,
Madagascar, the Indian Ocean] and possibly travel back by way of
Japan and Singapore, studying ants wherever he would go, Forel made
preparations to be gone about one year [from August 1912-1913]. He
had even written his Will [which is included in his autobiography by
the publisher in the German and English editions, but not the French
which was the language in which he wrote his Will]. But on May 17,
1912, as he began to dictate something to his secretary, he was
conscious of a tingling and numbness in his right arm and he could
not find the right words to express himself. He thought he might
have had a slight stroke but a doctor friend examined him and said it
was just due to excessive fatigue. However the symptoms continued,
his speech became indistinct and he fumbled for phrases. Within days
he was paralyzed on his right side. Now he was certain that it had been
a stroke and that he would have to give up his journey to the tropics.
He gradually trained his left hand to do many things. In the autumn
of 1912 he began to write his memoirs, using his wife’s journal since
she had kept an almost daily diary, and continued working on these
memoirs until 1916 when he put them aside for awhile. With his son-
in-law Arthur Brauns he went to Zurich in September for the session
of the International Union for Medical Psychology and Psychotherapy
where he was obliged to accept the Presidency in spite of his
compromised health (Forel 290-295).
10 Life and Times of August Forel
He eventually regained sufficient dexterity to be able to prune his
peach trees and do other gardening at home as rumors of war became
more threatening in Europe. In May 1914 he had written an article at
the request of the Hamburg Allgemeiner Beobachter concerning the
idea of a “United States of Europe” saying he was not in favor of
confining the League of Nations to Europe since he believed it should
include the whole world (Forel 299). As war approached, his eldest
daughter Inez married and moved to Canada, his remaining son Oskar
went with his Alpine regiment to the Swiss-Italian frontier, and his
son-in-law Arthur Brauns left in August for Germany where he was
appointed as an army surgeon in an auxiliary hospital. In Yvorne the
men had to join the frontier garrison. Forel and his remaining family
organized a crèche for infants and young children so the mothers
could replace their husbands in work on the land. He also began
writing pacifist articles which appeared in various periodicals, in both
French and German, and some were issued in pamphlet form in 1915
on the subject Les Etats-Unis de la Terre [“The United States of the
World”] (Forel 303). He expressed this view in his memoirs: “The truth
is that in the interest of the German people, whom I love and esteem,
I cannot too strongly condemn German feudalism and the militarism
and megalomania of the Pan-Germans. On the other hand, in France,
and even in my own country [Switzerland], I was often regarded as a
friend of Germany, and, indeed, suspected of secret Pan-Germanism....
In 1914, and again until 1918, I kept my pacifist correspondence in
special drawers in my library.... Far more significant for me were the
considered writings of really eminent minds, conceived in the neutral
sense of an international reconciliation and a lasting inter-State peace.
These I arranged in a drawer of their own in my library. My own ideas
in respect of the whole problem were recorded in [Forel’s pamphlet]
‘The United States of the World’” (Forel 305).
The biologist Professor Ernst Haeckel [1834-1919], in his 70’s by
1906, had formed the German Monist League along with a board
which included Forel. The Monist League argued for “biosocial
reform” and was an expression of Haeckel’s “social Darwinism” views.
Its philosophy claimed that, on scientific grounds, man was merely a
part of nature with no special transcendent qualities. At the same
time, German social Darwinists claimed Germans were members of a
“biologically superior community,” advancing some of the ideas that
were to become part of the core assumptions of national socialism.3 It
is interesting to note that in 1933, when Hitler became chancellor of
Germany, the Monist League was disbanded.
Views on “racial purity” spread worldwide. The eugenics movement
affected even California when, in 1909, it became the third state to
legalize the sterilization of the feeble-minded and insane. Eugenics
sterilization was in the mainstream of science and politics and upheld
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 11
by the U.S. Supreme Court. Eventually, more than 30 states with such
laws sterilized about 60,000 — a third of them in California, which
finally repealed its law in 1979.4
But Forel disagreed with some of Haeckel’s views. He wrote an
“open letter” in 1914 to Haeckel in Jena, the French version of which
was published in the Journal de Geneve, criticizing Haeckel’s essay on
“World War and Natural History” which he had sent to Forel in which
Haeckel had accused foreign countries of misrepresenting the German
Army as a “horde of barbarians and incendiaries.” Forel reminded
Haeckel that he had written in the Monistische Jahrhundert for
November 13, 1914 that it would be “highly desirable for the future
of Germany, and a federated Continental Europe, to besiege London,
to divide Belgium between Germany and Holland, and to give
Germany the Congo Free State, a great part of the British Colonies,
the north-eastern departments of
France, and the Baltic provinces of
Russia. To this you [Haeckel] add
that Poland should be amalgamated
with Austro-Hungary.... and your
colleagues demand that the
Emperor of Germany shall be the
President of the future United
States of Europe, and that the
military security of this federation
of States shall be entrusted to
Germany.... If these assertions have
any reality, then all foreign
countries, and even our little
Switzerland, will be compelled to
defend themselves against your
schemes of hegemony to the last
drop of their blood” (Forel 303-304).
Haeckel did not reply to Forel.
Shortly after Forel became a
Bahá’í [1920], the U.S. Bahá’í
educator Stanwood Cobb and his
wife, Nayam, visited the Forel home Arthur and Martha Brauns-Forel,
in Yvorne which he records in an Forel’s daughter and son-in-law, from
article on Forel published in The whom he first learned of the Bahá’í
Bahá’í Magazine of September 1924: Faith in 1920. Arthur died in 1925 in a
“After a most interesting tour of his canoe accident. Martha became one
of the pillars of the German Bahá’í
library, ... we noted the pictures of community under the Nazi regime,
Goethe, Haeckel, and Darwin, when the Bahá’í Faith was outlawed.
favorites of Forel (though he told me
he found Haeckel much too Source: Vader, between pages 22-23
12 Life and Times of August Forel
dogmatic, contrasting unfavorably with the modesty of Darwin)...”5
When I visited Switzerland and Forel’s home in Yvorne in 1990
and again in 1991, Auguste Forel’s picture was imprinted on the one-
thousand Franc banknote of Switzerland and it had been in circulation
for a few years. His portrait had also been on a Swiss postage stamp
issued in 1971. However, in 1997 a Swiss Citizens Commission on
Human Rights (CCHR Switzerland) claimed credit that it had
“exposed how the face of the 1,000 Swiss Franc bill was adorned by
one of the founders of the ideology that spawned Nazism — Swiss
psychiatrist August Forel” and that eight months later Forel’s face was
removed from the currency.6
Swiss National Bank
1000-franc note,
obverse and reverse
Source: Iraj Ayman
photocopy of
original bank note
During World War I Forel continually supported anti-war efforts
and movements, even attending international peace organizations
formed in The Hague. On May 1, 1916 he wrote an appeal stating, “I
believe only an international Socialist revolution can help us.... The
human race must kill the three dragons that are strangling it:
Capitalism, Militarism, and Alcoholism, or it will perish, the victim of
all three.... But by overcoming these, by the eugenic mating of the
best, the sterilization of the worst, and the help of social education
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 13
and the training of a well-disciplined, industrious Peace Army of all
men and women ... we may gradually begin a steady ascent to social
welfare on the basis of a supra-national peace.... Yet in vain I seek to
light the lantern of Diogenes, and with it enlighten the rulers of
Europe and America; so far I can find no man among them. Perhaps
one will come even yet.” And in July 1916 he resolved to become an
active Socialist (Forel 313-315).
Switzerland suffered during the war years and the Forel family,
with rationing, was unable to adequately feed and warm themselves.
Forel’s memoir recites that his wife even boiled earthworms for a meal
and that the price of coal forced them to give up central heating and
to content themselves with their fireplace during the winter of 1918-
1919 (Forel 317). At this time the Russian Legation in Bern informed
him that he had been appointed a member of the new Academy of the
Russian Soviet, but he had already heard of the “misdeeds of the so-
called dictatorship of the proletariat” so he sent a letter to the Russian
Legation declining the appointment “unless the deeds of violence of
which I spoke ceased immediately.” He never received a reply and later
heard the Russian Legation was expelled by the Swiss government
(Forel 322-323).
Forel’s memoir, Out of My Life and Work, closes in 1920, eleven
years before his death July 27, 1931 and cremation in Lausanne on
July 29, 1931. His son, Oskar, wrote in August 1934 in an Epilogue to
his father’s autobiography, “August Forel left the publication of his
memoirs to Herr Ernst Reinhardt, publisher, of Munich, since he
wished to make sure that his own family would not be involved in
their publication.... [T]he editor, with the permission of August
Forel’s widow, has greatly abridged it....” Forel himself wrote, “I have
made so many friends and enemies that I have felt afraid that my
obituary would be tendentious in one sense or another. For this reason
I preferred to write my own memoirs.... Many readers will take
offence at my opinions, and this I sincerely regret. But to tell the truth
when it must be told, and yet hurt no one’s feelings, is an art which is
beyond my capacities, and I cannot get out of my own skin, nor do I
wish to ...” (Forel Preface).
He wrote his personal “Testament” in the year 1912 which he states
in his memoir will be read by his son [Oskar] “as my own funeral
oration, during the cremation of my body” (Forel 332). [note: Bahá’í
law stipulates burial, not cremation, although Forel may have been
unaware of this law]. When Forel became a Bahá’í he added a Codicil
in August 1921 to his Will which was also read at his funeral before
hundreds of colleagues and admirers and it was included by the editor
in his memoir. It is this important document which states his Bahá’í
belief, “Our children should not be discouraged; they should, on the
14 Life and Times of August Forel
contrary, take advantage of the present world-chaos, by helping in the
difficult building of an ennobled and supranational human fabric on
the basis of a universal League of Peoples. In the year 1920, at
Karlsruhe, I first made acquaintance with the supraconfessional world-
religion of the Bahá’í, founded in the East seventy [sic] years ago by
the Persian Bahá’u’lláh. It is the true religion of the welfare of human
society, it has neither priests nor dogmas, and it binds together all the
human beings who inhabit this little globe. I have become a Bahá’í.
May this religion continue and be crowned with success; this is my
most ardent wish.... I am dying — I have died — in peace, desiring for
my ashes nothing better than the eternal rest, the ‘Nirvana,’ which
awaits them.... My ashes are sleeping the sleep of death. Remember
this, and think of me only with a quiet and cheerful mind, as you
think of my ants, my books, or the old walnut-trees in the garden....
We dead can do no more to alter the past; you living can give the
future a different form. Courage, then, and to work!” (Forel 341-343)
Dr. John Paul Vader wrote a valuable monograph (drawn from his
dissertation) published as For the Good of Mankind: August Forel and
the Bahá’í Faith [1984] which covers specifically those years
following the writing of Forel’s memoir [1920-1931] after he became
a Bahá’í. A summary of Vader’s work would make this essay too long
but, for a more complete view of Forel’s life, Vader’s book is
recommended. As Vader states, “It is theoretically possible for Forel to
have heard about the Bahá’í Faith before the winter of 1920-21....
Forel himself, however, clearly dates his first meeting with these
teachings to the winter months of 1920-21 which he spent at the
home of his daughter and son-in-law, Martha and Arthur Brauns-
Forel.” Dr. Arthur Brauns had opened his psychiatric clinic in Karlsruhe
and, in 1920, both he and his wife joined the Bahá’í Faith.7 Before
continuing with August Forel’s last years of life, when he was a Bahá’í,
let me conclude the story of the Brauns family since it is through them
the Faith is carried on today by the Forel family.
On September 1, 1925, Forel’s 77th birthday, tragically Arthur
Brauns was drowned in a canoe accident on the Rhone river, leaving
Martha a young widow with five children. Martha Brauns-Forel
became the center of the Bahá’í group in Karlsruhe and later served as
an elected member of the Bahá’í National Spiritual Assembly of
Germany. During World War II she suffered greatly, both personally
[her youngest son died on the Eastern Front and her eldest son was
seriously injured] and as part of the German Bahá’í community during
the eight-year suspension of Bahá’í activity in Germany [1937-1945].
She died at the age of 60 in August 1948.8 In May 2000, the
Karlsruhe Bahá’í community celebrated their 80th anniversary which
included an internet website review of their Bahá’í history from its
beginnings with the activities of Dr. Arthur and Martha Brauns-
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 15
Forel.9 The review states: “Marta Brauns experienced significant
difficulties during the Nazi regime. Shortly after the Nazis came to
power, it became apparent that Bahá’ís would be targets of hostilities
due to their global world views as well as their contacts with people
from all over the world. In 1937 Germany, Himmler outlawed the
Bahá’í religion. Marta Brauns-Forel was accused of participating in
the Bahá’í cause and being in contact with Jews and foreigners. She
was treated badly and insulted by the Gestapo. She wrote the
following to one of her sons: ‘My dear, dear child! It has happened
more than once in my life that I thought this must have been the most
difficult thing that could ever happen to me: August 1, 1914 [the
beginning of World War I], September 1, 1925 [Arthur Brauns’
death] ... but once again, fate has brought me days filled with horror
and dismay, causing me to fear for my own sanity.... I have been to
the Secret State-Police four days in a row now, and I thank God that
you have no idea what that really means.... The Gestapo has taken
everything. All letters and addresses ... no books, not a single page, no
prayer book, not a single one of those framed Golden Words.”10
Soon after Arthur and Martha Brauns had become Bahá’ís in
Karlsruhe, Forel sent ‘Abdu’l-Bahá a letter dated 28 December 1920,
in which he explained, “For my part, I am a monist, in the following
sense: I am convinced that the functionings of the brain and of the
human mind (or soul) are simply an inseparable whole. It follows that I
cannot believe that the individual soul survives after the brain has
died.... In metaphysical matters, on the other hand, I declare myself a
complete agnostic, like the philosopher Socrates or the great naturalist
Darwin, which means that ‘God’ for me is nothing but the Essence of
the Universe, presumably absolute, but for man absolutely
unknowable.... Despite all my admiration for your human principles, I
must confess that I do not understand your ‘Divine’ principles. This,
then, is my question: May I, yes or no, belong to the Bahá’í Faith, with
the agnosticism I have mentioned above, without deceiving myself
and others?” (Vader 14-15)
Forel’s fascinating letter, quite fully describing his beliefs,
activities, and Bahá’í literature he had read apparently was received in
Haifa but not responded to by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá until 21 September 1921
[among the last Tablets composed before ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s death 28
November 1921]. His Tablet to August Forel,11 known now to Bahá’ís
as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s proof of God’s existence, was not received by Forel
in Switzerland until March 1922, more than one year after Forel had
written to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and one year after Forel had already decided
to consider himself a Bahá’í.12
Some explanation is helpful to understand why there were delays in
the response to correspondence between Forel and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
16 Life and Times of August Forel
Forel’s letter13 needed to be translated in Haifa to receive ‘Abdu’l-
Bahá’s considered answer and this was during the last few months of
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s busy life. Then, after ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet was
written, it was decided in Haifa to have it translated into English and
French for wider distribution to Bahá’ís worldwide which is explained
in the cover letter written by Shoghi Effendi, dated 27 February 1922
Haifa, Palestine and sent with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet to Forel. In
Shoghi Effendi’s letter he tells Forel that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s sudden
passing, “has plunged us all in profound grief and added heavily to
our preoccupations and responsibilities. Happily, however, the full
answer to your [Forel’s] epistle had been written, and signed by him
[‘Abdu’l-Bahá] many days before his passing ...” (Vader 18-19)
This essay will not include an analysis of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s famous
Tablet to Forel but, for the purpose of this work, it is important to say
what Forel responded to Shoghi Effendi when he wrote back on
Sunday, 19 March 1922: “... Of course I empower you to publish the
long and interesting answer which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá took the trouble to
give me. Out of love for truth I must tell you, however, that I stray
from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s opinion on one point although at heart I am a
follower of the twelve Bahá’í principles ... the soul dies with the brain,
and I cannot believe that it lives on after the individual has died....
The short and simple question which I ask you please to answer
concisely, in place of your late lamented Grandfather, is this: ‘May I,
yes or no, consider myself a Bahá’í, without being a hypocrite after
the confession of faith I have just made? ... I would like to be a Bahá’í
without misunderstanding and without hypocrisy, a ‘leftist’ Bahá’í if
you like, but with the same rights as are enjoyed by the rightists. I
wanted to ask ‘Abdu’l-Bahá himself [Forel seems to have forgotten
that he did ask ‘Abdu’l-Bahá this very same question in his 28
December 1920 letter], but it is too late. This is why I ask you to
answer in his place ...” (Vader 19-21) Vader reports in his book that
there is no evidence in Forel’s papers of a direct response by Shoghi
Effendi to this letter, though Forel said he corresponded often with
Shoghi Effendi, since tragically much of Forel’s correspondence and
possessions were disposed of after his death. Nevertheless, Forel
undoubtedly considered himself a Bahá’í and continued to identify
himself as one in his letters and publications from 1921 until his death
in 1931.
After his declaration of Faith he had contact with several
prominent Bahá’ís including visits from Hippolyte Dreyfus, Stanwood
Cobb and his wife, Consul and Mrs. Schwarz, Mr. and Mrs.
Mountfort Mills and Miss Martha Root (Vader 28-29). Forel founded
the “Bahá’í group” in Lausanne in May 1922.
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 17
He immediately set himself to teaching and defending the Faith,
particularly on behalf of the persecuted Iranian Bahá’ís in the mid-
1920’s, to influence European public opinion. He audaciously wrote
of these persecutions to the French Foreign Minister Edouard Herriot
[10 April 1925]; to the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna [26 April 1925]
and other newspapers; and to the Secretary-General of the League of
Nations Sir Eric Drummond [12 May 1926] from whom he received a
disappointing, but expected, response stating the League of Nations
was powerless to help since Persia had not accepted an international
agreement for the protection of minorities. When all members of the
Local Bahá’í Assembly of Constantinople were on trial on charges of
subversion, Forel wrote to Mustapha Kamal Pasha [Ataturk] in
Ankara on 18 November 1927. In this letter he advised Ataturk, “... if
you were to declare the Bahá’í Faith as an official religion of Turkey,
in addition to Islam, you would make a great step towards progress
and would give an example to all of Europe and even to all the
nations of the world!” The trial of the Bahá’ís did have a favorable
outcome (Vader 53-59).
Among the most well known of his articles written for and
published in Bahá’í sources is “World Vision of a Savant,” first
published in Star of the West in February 1928 and included in The
Bahá’í World, Volume III, 1928-1930. In this article, Forel shares his
“scientific” views on human behavior which reflect the racist
understandings and attitudes of that time: “... one makes a pretext
that there are differences in races; but if one excepts those races,
altogether inferior, with a lighter cerebrum (according to Wedda
about eight hundred or eight hundred and fifty grams instead of one
thousand) it is a fundamental error.... There are several conditions of
utmost importance which Bahá’ís ought to meet if they wish to remain
scientific.... They should refrain from metaphysics, from seeking to
know the Unknowable; and should occupy themselves wholly with the
social good of humanity here on earth.... Our duty as Bahá’ís is not only
to speak and think of God, but to be active for the social good.”14
Vader cogently reviews those areas of Forel’s beliefs which diverge
from Bahá’í belief as understood today. These include Forel’s concept
of God, in which he considered himself agnostic, monist, pantheist
and unable to believe in a “personal” God, and his rejection of the
immortality of the soul after death. Forel also was outspoken in his
political views, defining himself as a “leftist” and with anti-capitalistic
views, which he incorporated in a listing of 12 principles entitled
“Principles of the Bahá’ís” and published in Sonne der Wahrheit, the
German contemporary official Bahá’í magazine. The final area of
divergence from Bahá’í beliefs was in his racist attitudes, no doubt
influenced by anthropological views of his day (Vader 33-38). Forel
also was among many well known individuals who signed the Anti-
18 Life and Times of August Forel
Conscription Manifesto of 1926 which included Albert Einstein,
M.K. Gandhi, Martin Buber, Bertrand Russell, Rabindranath Tagore,
and H.G. Wells. The 1930 petition Against Conscription and the
Military Training of Youth was signed by Forel, along with some of
the others mentioned before, and also Jane Addams, Paul Birukoff
and Valentin Bulgakoff (secretaries of Leo Tolstoy), John Dewey,
Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, and Upton Sinclair among others.15
When Forel passed away, his Bahá’í daughter Martha Brauns-Forel
informed Shoghi Effendi16 to which Shoghi Effendi’s secretary, H.
Rabbani, replied on Shoghi Effendi’s behalf dated 10 September
1931: “... However great the contradictions in Dr. Forel’s testament in
regard to his attitude towards the Cause we cannot fail to recognize
him as a Bahá’í who had but a partial glimpse of the Bahá’í
Revelation. No one can claim that his knowledge of this Revelation is
adequate, especially in the embryonic stage of its development. Dr.
Forel was sincere in his convictions but like every human being his
comprehension was limited and this was not in his power to change...”
(Vader 40)
The year of Forel’s death,
four months later, Shoghi
Effendi penned his magnificent
letter to the Bahá’ís of the world
[“The Goal of a New World
Order,” November 28, 1931] in
which he ponders the decade
since ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing
[1921-1931], the same last
decade of Forel’s life as a Bahá’í.
Shoghi Effendi laid before us a
description of a war-weary world,
the signs of impending chaos, the
impotence of statemanship, the
guiding principles of world
order, and the principle of
oneness, the “pivot” round which
all the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh
revolve. The call for a federation
of mankind, a deep wish of ‘My beloved Emma, my faithful, kind
August Forel, would, Shoghi and devoted comrade, the unfailing of
Effendi wrote, require “the fire sunshine in my life ... bestowed upon
of ordeal.” Both a call, and a me ... the most precious things in life:
warning, which the world ignores love and optimism.’
at its peril. Source: Vader, between pages 60-1
Lights of ‘Irfán Book Six 19
Appen di x : Significant dat es o f e v e nts an d correspondenc e
of August Forel a n d ‘ Abdu’l- B a há
Birth & Death of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá: May 23, 1844 — November 28, 1921
Birth & Death of August Forel: September 1, 1848 — July 27, 1931
December 28, 1920: Forel wrote an inquiry letter to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
asking if he could be considered a Bahá’í after explaining his
“agnostic views.”
September 21, 1921: Two months before His passing, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
wrote His famous Tablet to Forel on the existence of God. The
original Persian text was then published in Cairo in 1922. Forel did
not receive ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s answer (Tablet) sent from Haifa until the
end of February 1922.
February 27, 1922: Date of the cover letter to Forel from the
Guardian Shoghi Effendi written from Haifa, as the “grandson of
‘Abdu’l-Bahá,” explaining the delay in sending ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s answer
(Tablet) to Forel (various translations were being made). Following
‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing, Shoghi Effendi had arrived in Haifa on
December 29, 1921 from England. The Guardian then left Haifa on
April 5, 1922 for rest and recuperation in Europe and was gone for 8
months, returning December 15, 1922. He had left his Great Aunt
Bahiyyih Khanum, the Greatest Holy Leaf, and an “assembly” of 9
persons in charge during his absence.
March 19, 1922: Forel acknowledges receipt of Shoghi Effendi’s letter
and the various translations (into English and French) of ‘Abdu’l-
Bahá’s Tablet to Forel, 15 months after Forel’s original inquiry to
‘Abdu’l-Bahá asking whether he [Forel], could consider himself a
Bahá’í “without being a hypocrite.” No specific answer to Forel’s
acknowledgment of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet was sent from Shoghi
Effendi, but he had left Haifa (see above) on April 5, 1922 to be gone
8 months. Very little of the correspondence remains in Forel’s papers
between Shoghi Effendi and Forel because of disposal by Forel’s heirs.
Forel states, in a Codicil added in August 1921 to his original Will
and Testament, which he had written between 1912, following a
stroke, until 1924, that he learned of the Bahá’í Faith in Karlsruhe in
1920. The Codicil was read, at Forel’s instruction, by his son Oscar at
the ceremony on July 29, 1931 following Forel’s cremation. This is the
one reference of his Bahá’í beliefs left in his writings which survives
today:
At Karlsruhe, in 1920, I first came to know of the
supraconfessional world religion of the Bahá’ís, founded in
the East more than 75 years ago [this was written in 1921] by
the Persian Bahá’u’lláh. This is the true religion of human
social good, without dogmas or priests, uniting all men on
this small terrestrial globe of ours. I have become a Bahá’í.
20 Life and Times of August Forel
May this religion live and prosper for the good of mankind;
this is my most ardent wish.
NOTES
August Forel, Out of My Life and Work, translated by Bernard Miall
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1937) 20. Hereafter referred to in text as
(F o re l with page number reference).
Santiago Ramon y Cajal Biography, Official website of The Nobel
Foundation, last modified June 27, 2003.
George J. Stein, “Biological Science and the Roots of Nazism: The
Promotion of racist doctrines in the name of science,” American
Scientist, January-February 1988, 76, 50-58.
Mike Anton, “Forced Sterilization Once Seen as Path to a Better
World,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 2003, A-1, A-18.
Stanwood Cobb, “Man and the Ant,” The Bahá’í Magazine, 15:6
(September 1924): 166-170.
http:/www.cchr.org.
John Paul Vader. For The Good of Mankind: August Forel and the
Bahá’í Faith. Oxford: George Ronald, 1984, 13. Hereafter referred to in
text as (Vader with page number reference).
“In Memoriam: Marta Brauns-Forel 1888-1948,” BW Vol. XI, 1946-1950,
481-483.
http:/www.bahai.de/karlsruhe/80jahre.html: translated from the German
by Houshang Banani, August 2003.
ibid.
First English translation by Dr. Zia Baghdadi published in SW 13:8
(November 1922): 195-202; another English translation was published in
BW XV (1968-1973): 37-43.
Forel had added the Codicil to his Will in August 1921 declaring himself
a Bahá’í.
Forel’s letter was dated 28 December 1920 although mistakenly referred
to in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet as dated 28 July 1920.
August Forel, “The World Vision of a Savant,” BW III (1928-1930): 286-
287.
http://www.peace.ca
Her letter was dated 22 August 1931.
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